Allan goes to Berlin

I went to visit Hanover, Berlin and Copenhagen in March 1993. This is the story of
my adventures.

Hanover

My first leg of the trip was to Hanover, to CeBIT, the largest
computer trade show in the world. I was to be picked up by Dieter,
the manager of our office in Europe.

He picked me up from the airport, we got into his BMW, and onto the
Autobahn. The Autobahn is really just like a regular freeway
anywhere else, it's just that there's no speed limit for most of it. It's
as if you tried to drive as fast as you possibly could on American
highways; you always end up being limited by the slowest drivers in
the left lanes, although that didn't seem to be as much as a problem
in Germany as it's legal and accepted to go arbitrarily fast (in
practice, up to about 100 or 120mph). He was telling me that the
lack of speed limit was causing problems in the EC and so might be
a doomed concept.

He put me up for the night at his place, a nice house out in the
country, where I recovered from my jetlag for a day, before we
headed off to Hanover. His car had great maneuverability and felt
like a lot of fun.

At the show I spent my time with Dieter, Daniel and this woman
named Monika from Aachen (AH-kin). She worked for a
distributor and was the main Maple demo person. I was the main
Theorist demo person. The only problem was that she had a top-of-
the-line 486 running the Windows version, and I had a little tiny
Mac IILC, probably similar to the bottom of the line Mac that Apple
sells now.

CeBIT is huge. It's held in a special fair grounds devoted to the 23
trade shows held in Hanover yearly, of which CeBIT is one of the
biggest. Hanover is a trade-show town and the city's economy is
dependent on the shows.

We stayed in the homes of middle-class residents in the suburbs
around Hanover, some people that Dieter knew. CeBIT completely
overwhelms the hotel system and so the overflow is taken by people
who, in some cases, sleep in couches while guests sleep in their
rooms. Like a B&B, they serve a good German breakfast the next
morning, consisting of one soft-boiled egg, rolls, cheese, and wurst
(top-notch cold cuts), and some coffee, tea and maybe orange juice.
Sortof like a deluxe continental breakfast. I never really liked it
but I learned to live with it.

I remember the first time we walked onto the fairgrounds. We
passed by a open garage door of a building. Inside, it looked just
like a typical MacWorld Expo building, with booths being set up
over a huge floor. Then I looked at the number next to the door.
This was building number six. We were in building number 21.

Every day, the city would turn several highways so that both
directions were one-way, going into the fairgrounds, and then after
the show closes, the other way. Dieter didn't go those ways, though.
He always took another route on single lane country roads that he
knew of in the area. It was a riot. Every morning we'd go pretty
much the same way, through small German towns until we got
closer. He'd cut into this one gas station, and zip out the back exit
onto a different road. And down some other roads, a few of them
dirt roads, coming out on a main intersection right across the street
from the entrance to the CeBIT parking lot.

He wasn't the only one; every morning the intersection into the
fairgrounds from the farmer's road would queue up traffic. In
general I was always being driven around by someone else and I
never really knew where I was. I have enough trouble driving in
America.

Nobody has any Macintoshes in Germany, and all I had was
Macintosh software. A few people had Amigas. One guy thought he
could get his Macintosh emulator on his Amiga to work. (France
and Sweden are very strongly Mac, and the rest of Europe is mostly
in between. Many areas, especially those whose people's time is not
worth money, go for cheap PCs.)

The show, one must remember, is a German trade show, and as is
the case when San Francisco has a trade show, most of the
attendees come from within a few hours driving radius. 85% of the
language spoken and printed on trade show displays was German.
Then there was about 10% that was English, and the rest was
French and other languages.

One time, I noticed that the crowd seemed very Caucasian, so I did
an experiment where I walked through the crowd counting how
many people were non-Caucasian. It was a bit tricky, but I had two
categories: people who were east Asian (Burma through
Kamchatka), and people who had colored skin but weren't east
Asian (India through the Arabic countries down to South Africa,
plus possibly native Americans and Hispanics if I thought their
color was dark enough). In about twenty minutes of walking time,
constantly scanning the crowd, I counted about a dozen and a half
individuals in each category. I used my own intuitive judgement in
classifying them; in most cases I had time to stop and wander closer
to them to get a good look (they were sparsely scattered). You see a
lot of caucasians in twenty minutes of crowded trade show; my eyes
were constantly kept busy. If they just looked like they came from
Greece or something, they didn't count. It was a bit arbitrary and
inaccurate but it was fun and educational anyway.

I learned more German, as I was surrounded by native German
speakers who varied in English skill over the full spectrum. My
pronunciation is so good that sometimes it fools a lot of people who
babble answers back to me in rapid German. My biggest problem is
the nouns, verbs and adjectives, especially the ones I don't know,
which is most of them. I know just enough to get me by, which
seems to be how much I knew after my last trip, but I think I must
know more now because they were teaching me more.

There's these two adjectives in German that give you an idea of
where they are coming from. When you look for bathrooms, they
are labeled "HERREN" and "DAMEN". There are also adjectives,
herrlich and damlich. Herrlich means strong or wonderful.
Damlich means silly or stupid. The women's movement in
Germany is busy doing something about that, like trying to make
those words politically incorrect. Soon as I learn a couple of new,
useful words, they go out of fashion.

Beer is a very important part of German life, and they take it
seriously, sometimes too seriously. Every beer that is poured from
the tap comes in a beerglass specifically designed by the company
with its logo, in color; and each one has a little gradation mark on
the back, marking full, with the amount that that line marks,
usually either 0.3l, 0.4l or 0.5l. In fact, I do not remember being
poured a beer at a commercial establishment that did not come this
way. Maybe the logo on the front was getting worn off, but that was
in the cheap places. One time, at CeBIT, there was a party held in
one of the other halls. Beer was being served in little 0.2l glasses,
each with their logo and gradation mark in the back.

I left the trade show after a few days; Dieter wanted me mostly for
credibility in going around and making deals with other
companies.

Berlin

As I write this, I'm in the Stralsund Rüngedam train station. I've
never heard of this East German town in my life, but somebody told
me it's supposed to be on the Baltic coast. It's 5:56am and dark. The
little house in the middle the platform is trashed out with no
windows and wood scrap inside and clearly hasn't been used in
years. Further on down, the stairs lead down to a cold concrete
passage. It's bleak and abandoned.

I'm on my way from Berlin to Copenhagen, or København, as it's
spelled around here. Or there.

There are a total of four people here, all passengers. The bathrooms
are locked up and I guess I'll have to wait for the next train and its
on-board toilet or else be really crude. After being in the places I've
been in tonight, I'm not interested in being crude.

It's been a pretty exciting day. I finished up my Berlin visit, and
things just kept on happening. (I still consider it part of the same
day because I've slept about an hour and a half.)

I didn't decide on going to Berlin until the last minute. It was a very
good choice.

About half my time I spent exploring the newly reopened East
Berlin. I have this morbid fascination with Hitler, the War, the
Wall, and all that. Between the wall and the fact that the Soviets
took the really juicy but smaller slice of Berlin, I spent about half of
my daytime hours in the Eastern part.

The first day I took a typical bus tour of the city. I learned that
Berlin is really interesting, with much more culture, compassion
and fun than I thought possible. We tend to all think of the Hitler
thing when we think of Germany and Berlin, but the impression I
got was that it was as though Ed Meese became President and ruled a
far-right extremist government from San Francisco, despite the
feelings of the local clientele. Just remember that Adolf Hitler
came from Austria, and Karl Marx came from Germany.

So right near the end of the bus tour, as we were leaving East Berlin,
the tour guide pointed out approximately where Hitler's last bunker
was, the "Führerbunker", as depicted in more than one movie and
documentary. I circled it on my map: a block down Voß street
(pronounced "foss", transliterated into english as "Voss"). I'm on a
mission, I told myself. A mission from the Lord. I've got to check
this out. There's probably a museum on top of it now, I thought to
myself.

As the accounts go, Hitler spent his last several days in the bunker,
as he heard reports of the Americans and Russians closing in on
Berlin from both sides. Finally, he and Eva Braun went to an open
pit, he shot her, covered both of them with gasoline, then somehow
he shot himself and lit a match, not necessarily in that order. I've
spent a bit of time trying to figure out exactly how he did that, but
that's not important for the story.

If you go to Berlin, make sure to catch the Checkpoint Charlie
Museum. I went there the second day I was in Berlin. Right down
the street from the real live Checkpoint Charlie, on Friedrich
street, which for decades was the only passage from the east to the
west, it has lots of displays of all of the different escape attempts,
including in many cases the actual cars, hang-gliders and
harnesses used, as appropriate. It also has large sections on passive
resistance protest in history, such as Gandi, Prague Spring, and
Martin Luther King. Notably absent was discussions of resistance
to the Nazi strongarm government; the story I got was that all
resistance was met with iron-fist arrest and execution and so, like,
sit-down protests don't have much effect. Agreed, at least for the
time being.

The train has finally come to pick us up. It's weird walking around
so late at night that the sun is coming up. On to Rostock, the place
where, recently, Neo-Nazi gangs burned down foreigner
apartments. The official response was to move all foreigners out of
Rostock.

This train has little of the Eastern European smell that you
typically get in some such rail cars. I can open the window anyway.
There's this characteristic smell that many Eastern European
countries have, almost like they all use the same state-dictated
cleaning supplies. It's not a particularly pleasing smell, but the
Eastern Block was never into aesthetic frills. I think that if smell
went over CNN, the second Russian Revolution would have
happened five or ten years earlier.

There's hardly any other passengers on this train, so I have a
compartment to myself. The last train was from Poland, and had
signs printed in five languages: Polish (of course), Russian (of
course), German (of course), French and Italian. Aw, come on,
surely you can understand one of those languages! I pretended to
read the German version and was satisfied with 40%
comprehension.

Straslund station. At least in this place there's an official
presence, there's somebody on the PA system rambling on in
incomprehensible German that I probably couldn't understand
even if it was Walter Cronkite English.

We're off again. I know just enough German to explain to the ticket
guy my change in itinerary. "It is different. This is old. This is
new." He seems to buy it.

You can tell that the Berliners hate the wall. Places where it clearly
used to be have been reconstructed so as to show nary a scrape mark
as evidence of where the wall was. New sidewalks and asphalt
make it hard to trace the path it ran. You can't find a map showing
the division of the city or of the country any more (unless you get it
from outside of the country). There's just a handful of places I
found that still have any wall ("mauer"). There's one place where
they've fenced a section off for safe keeping, probably as a
permanent monument, near some other SS memorabilia.

Then, there's this place called Potsdamer Platz. Potsdamer Platz
used to be the hub of the city before and during the war, full of stores
and cars and statues and pedestrians. The war came, the bombs
came, the Allies came, and the pie was sliced from the center
outward, and Potsdamer Platz was the center. The wall came, no-
mans-land existed, and the wall left. Today, the area is so desolate
that they've set up the circus in all the open space.

I went to what's left of Potsdamer Platz after I left Checkpoint
Charlie. Across from the circus, there's a construction site. A piece
of the wall still stands, starting from a building that used to be part
of the wall, and ending in the middle of a construction site, behind
temporary, construction-site fences. And, there's panels of the wall
just standing there for anybody to examine, admire, or, ahem, pick
at. And people clearly have been. There's no easily pickable
chunks because those have already been removed to private
collections. And, there's no signs saying "Picken Verboten an der
Mauer" or whatever. The impression I got was that they'd be quite
happy to see the wall eventually erode away by force of souvenir
hunter.

And, then, right down the street from the circus, was the place the
tour guide pointed out as Hitler's bunker. I walked around the
neighborhood several times. There was no museum. There was
some new apartment buildings and a playground. There was a large,
old administrative building and behind it was construction
wasteland. Right in the middle was a big pit where a building used
to be and all that was left was the concrete floor of the foundation.
And, on one end of it, spray painted in black on some yellow tile,
were the words "BUNKER HIER" (English translation: "Bunker
Here"). Below it it said "TUNNEL" (English translation: "Tunnel")
and an arrow pointing down. Wow.

The East Germans didn't have resources to fix up very many things
after the war. Things frequently were just left as-is. People have
told me that Dresden still has piles of rubble from the famous
bombing raid that Kurt Vonnegut wrote about. (Probably the train
station at Stralsund Rüngedam was left untouched, too.) Maybe
they had just let the Führerbunker sit. I hope they at least swept up
his ashes and put them somewhere.

Was this it? I tried to ask some people who were walking around the
neighborhood. It's nontrivial when you don't know much of the
native language. "Wo ist der Führerbunker?" One guy motioned
that it was far east of there. Another one seemed to think it was far
north of there. Meanwhile, I had to get to a bank that was still open
and so I had to leave the area until a few days later.

Rostock is really drab. They did the foreigners a service by moving
them out. Probably packed them off to some place that was
described as "summer camp".

Meanwhile, I read also in my tour guide book that Hitler's bunker
was still around "near Potsdamerplatz". A good sign. It's not just a
spacy bus tour guide that points vaguely in some direction with a
claim, but there's also a two-year-old guide book that agrees with it.
Maybe the tourbook writers took the same bus tour I did.

The day before I had to leave, I took a tour of the German Reichstag,
the parliament building, and it's museum display, named
something like "The History of the German Reichstag and
Questions on German History". There, I could get my questions
answered, I thought. I visualized myself in an audience of
geographically illiterate Americans asking stupid questions, like
why didn't the Germans and Russians just team up in World War 2,
and I raise my hand and ask where the Füherbunker is, with a Bart-
Simpson-like gleam in my eye.

I get the feeling that something was lost in the translation of the
name because there was no question and answer period, just a
typical modern museum depicting the history of Germany as a
country and the political stuff that went on, including how the
Reichstag was broken down into fifteen parties and how they
struggled for control, all explained in grotesque detail on very well
done cards and displays, full of large chunks of German that I
pretended to understand as I ran the words through my exhausted
brain. I got a tape that was supposed to guide me through the
museum in English, but half way through I figured out that it was
designed for the museum BEFORE they revamped it. All of the sign
numbers throughout the museum were now not aligned with what
my tape said. They were close enough, though, to carry me through
about half way before I got wise.

History was, of course, told from the German perspective. At the
end of World War I, supposedly, the people protested the government
and forced the Kaiser to abdicate, making way for a democratic
government. Well. Glad we got that straightened out. I'd always
thought it had to do with the armistice.

Finally I found an information booth and asked them the question.
"Oh, it's not there anymore, they're building apartments over it." I
pressed her for an address, and she gave me the corner of Voß and a
street name that had been changed recently (Voß is only two blocks
long). Bingo.

I'm now in Warnemünde (var-neh-monday), an extremely cute fishing village whose
main claim to fame is that it's the dock for ferrys from East
Germany to Denmark. It's cloudy and drisseling, but usually I don't
bother to put my hat on. There are seagull sounds filling the
silence. The train station at first seems deserted, although there
are various workmen wandering around managing the trains and
tracks. Then, I walk back past a building I had already given up as
abandoned, and in fact there inside is the info and ticket desks, and
a little hole-in-the-wall grocery store that also serves food. On the
wall is listed a wide variety of foods like pizza, hamburgers, chili,
spaghetti, "Gulaschsuppe", Pasta Venetiana and other dubious
dishes, all with color pictures. None of them were available.
All she has is a hotdog and a roll for
2.30DM (about $1.50). I had breakfast.

The bathroom is closed, and, in an incredible feat of translation
(an incredible coincidence of words I happen to know) I get the idea
that I go into town to this hotel for the bathroom. On the way,
there's a little farmer's market in progress (it's Sunday morning)
and lots of fishing boats tied up along the creek I cross by bridge to
go into town, just a stone's throw away. When I get there, it's really
across the street from the hotel. Seeing it's a pay-toilet, I pay the
woman a mark (65¢) for the cleanest bathroom since Berlin. Whew.

After leaving the Reichstag museum, I went to Voß Straße again
(straße = shtrrrassi = street). Walking around the suspected bunker,
I found a section of the fence that was ripped down so I walked in
and down the dirt into the floor. All that exists of the building that
was there is a slab where a basement floor would be. It's too old to
look recent but too new to be part of the bunker; it must have been
some East German building. The walls are just dirt sloping at 45°
embedded with typical construction debris. At one end is the yellow
tile wall with the graffiti.

There it is, "Bunker Hier" on yellow tile that's a bit too modern to
be the right thing. A few feet away is some brick that actually looks
like it's from that era (it looks just like the brick from the SS
museum nearby), with more graffiti, "Bunker Hier" again. This
time it actually looks like this is the top part of a buried tunnel.
There's a big hole between the bricks with the graffiti and the
concrete slab that forms the floor of the pit, but it's filled in with
dirt and trash, and I'm not really equipped to start digging right
now, wearing reasonably presentable street clothes and having no
shovel.

So, it's time to leave Warnemünde, the sea port fishing village, and
there's instant confusion. I'm supposed to go to gate 8. There is no
gate 8. Finally I talk to someone who knows what's going on, and
can speak English. He's a naval engineer from Rostock who's going
to Copenhagen for a conference. I didn't discuss politics with him.
We don't get on the train; we get on the boat. And, the train gets on
the boat. It's complicated, but the front of the ferryboat opens up
and several rail cars slide in. If I had taken a sleeping car, I might
be on that train right now. But instead people are asked to get off
the train and onto the boat. Whatever. There's no real seats in the
boat except in the cafeteria in uncomfortable cafeteria chairs.

So I grab some samples of old brick and wrap them in pages from
an old brochure I had with me. I ran out of pages and started to use
pages out of my tour guide book.

So I got these samples and I felt really proud of myself, except I kept
on thinking, what if this is just old brick junk I'm going to be
dragging around in my luggage and this really isn't the bunker? I
started to ask people who were walking by on the street. Most were
just suburban residents who had no clue and didn't know what I
was talking about.

Then, I ran into this old woman who turned into a goldmine of
information. Yes, the bunker was here. Not where I had thought
but right across the street, where the new apartments were. The
bunkers are gone now, but there was tunnels all over connecting
different buildings and bunkers.

Where was I from? California, just visiting. She insisted that I see
the Pergammon museum. I couldn't really place the name; there's
so many museums in Berlin to see, I hadn't been to this one yet. It
was so important, she had to show me where it was. Did I have
time? She wanted to show me where it was, in person. She finally
ended up giving me a tour of downtown East Berlin as we walked
together about four miles.

She was an East Berliner. She told me she had lived under forty
years of dictatorship, starting when she was 10 years old. She
started rattling off all of these details about the officials under
Hitler and where they lived and where they worked and who they
slept with and where the government had special places especially
for them for whatever reasons. Her English was very sparse but it
was better than my German - we spent about 3/4 of the time
speaking English and the rest in German when she was struggling
for a word that I thought I knew.

She described to me the four museums that make up Museum
Island. A river flows through East Berlin, and at one point it splits
into two rivers. The island in between was where people first
settled the area. It's now called Museum Island and contains four
museums (a fifth is under construction). Of course, there's other
museums nearby, along with cathedrals and old churches and what
not. They all have intricate statues standing on rooftops and
balconies. They all have lots of stone stained black from the Allied
bombing in 1945. She recommended especially that I go to the
Pergammon museum.

Berlin is a huge city. The western part alone is four times the size of
Paris. There's a ton of stuff there, too much to see in six days, and I
completely missed out on lots of things, some of which I tried to
make up for last night, in eleventh-hour sightseeing before my
train left. Literally, eleventh hour; my train was scheduled to leave
at 12:13am that night.

So, twenty four hours ago, I started off my last day in Berlin by
going to the Pergammon museum, just as the woman had directed
me to. It's the most incredible museum I've ever been to in my
entire life. Most museums of ancient artifacts have lots of typical-
sized objects from whenever, with little cards next to each one
explaining what's going on, with the occasional life-size mummy
or vehicle or whatever. This museum had huge façades of buildings,
full size, which were taken from their original locations in Turkey
and Iraq and reassembled in the auditorium-sized rooms in this
museum in Berlin. The explanations given were that some deal was
struck between the archeologists and the particular governments,
but it's reasonable to assume that a country with less arrogance
would not have gotten away with so much.

We landed and now I'm on the train through Denmark on the way to
Copenhagen. We landed on the southern end of the island of
Zeeland, but Copenhagen is on the east side. Cute little farms on
gently rolling countryside. All of the farmhouses have that
distinctive European look to them.

As I was finishing up the last museum I saw, I started to get nervous
about calling Poul. It was 5pm, my train left at midnight, and I still
hadn't told him when I was arriving, and I still had to get a piece of
the wall and I had to see some other sights and pick up my luggage
and show up at the train station. Leaving the museum, I wandered
until I found a phone booth - and it was broken. It looked like an
old one from the Communist era. I asked someone who said that
the closest one was on Alexander Platz - a ways away, but close to
some sights that I hadn't seen yet. I wandered off in that direction,
and it was hard to find a phone. Go to the station, someone said. A
guy accosted me there and told me he was an East Berliner and he
needed money. He showed me where the phones that work were,
and I gave him about 40¢ in pfennigs. He complained at me that it
was so little.

I called Poul. No answer. It was a sortof funny sounding no answer,
maybe something was wrong. I was pissed at myself because I'd had
all week to call him, but I kept on having stupid things happen; like
I locked the phone number in my safe in the room and I don't want
to spend a mark to open the safe to get it.

So, I started wandering around. I had dinner at a restaurant that
took charge cards (I was running out of Deutschemarks and the
banks were closed and it was the last day). As I came out, I saw a
street that looked cute, so I walked down it. It lead to a church that
was mentioned in my guidebook, Nickolaiskirche (Nickolais's
Church). A tall, red brick church with beautiful stained-glass
windows. All of the buildings all around were restored, like a cute
little middle-ages German town. There was a fountain with the
obligatory statue inside in front and a large metal medallion
embedded in the cobblestone that said something about a merger of
two pre-federation German nation-states. All of the R's were
backward for some mysterious reason. It was quaint and
historically relevant and peaceful and I was struck with a
compelling feeling of completion, like I had found my peace with
Berlin and it was a perfect moment.

I wanted to follow the guide book and some of the areas that it said
were nice. After five or six o'clock, all the museums shut down, so I
was reduced to walking around buildings and gawking at their
magnificent statues and architecture. I spent too much time
tracking down a neighborhood that wasn't worth it. Wanting to
rest, I found the nearest bus stop bench. Maybe I should sit on the
part of the bench with the lightning-bolt "SS" graffiti carved into
it. Ahem. Well, maybe I should keep walking.

I kept on finding phone booths and calling Poul. I got no answer
again. At one point I thought that maybe there was some other
reason why I was getting the weird signal, so I thought perhaps I was
dialing too many zeros on the front of the number so I dialed one
less. I ended up talking to a German operator who spoke no
English, not even a polite "I can't speak English". He hung up and
took my two marks.

I wandered around some more. I went to a plaza between buildings
that was supposed to be the place where Hitler staged a big historic
book burning. The building next to it was some sort of Third Reich
building that Hitler used to give speeches from the balcony of. As
with many such buildings in the area, there are intricate statues on
the corners and balconies. The building is shaped with a curve
inward, almost like it's a flashlight reflector, focusing rays of
influence into the minds of the people in the crowd in the plaza. I
could still see him there, ending a sentence yelling
"...Deutschland!" with his fist shooting into the air at a 60° angle,
and the crowd roars amidst banners of red with black swastikas.

The place is now a cobblestone parking lot. The night was quiet,
and a cool breeze was in the air.

There's lots of cobblestone in Germany. This is one of the ways in
which Europe's flavor differs from America's - cobblestone
walkways and driveways. There's rectangular or square bricks
that look like the bricks in a wall. There's stones shaped like bow-
ties that all fit together. There's large, smooth concrete tiles for
long, efficient walkways or driveways that resemble somewhat the
way American sidewalks are, but you intuitively know that the
stones were placed individually, instead of just pouring concrete
and scraping fake dividing lines as they do in the states.

There's cobblestones that are roughly cut stones, all approximately
cube shaped, all about the size of your fist, that are more decorative
but still make a fine walking or driving surface. Sometimes there's
stone stones, each an odd shape and size, simply cemented together
in a very rough surface. There's red stones, gray stones, yellow
stones, and stones with beautiful marbling or granite speckle
patterns.

Usually it's decorative but frequently there's some communication
value to it. Whereas in America we would lay down asphalt and
paint lines on top to mark bike lanes or driveways, in Europe, they
lay down gray tiles for a walkway, and red bricks for a bike way,
with a rough stone style filling the spaces in between and around.
In America, a speed bump is an obnoxious lump of asphalt that's
indicated with a sign or paint so as to avoid the inevitable
interpretation that it was simply a sloppily laid road. In Europe,
it's a block of rough cobblestone, enriching the pathway and the
driver by its presence.

I wandered to a phone again and called Poul. His wife answered the
phone and I got it all set. Ah. I felt like all of my problems were
solved. Except for a few other tasks. All of which had to be
completed before midnight.

There was a set of three buildings I wanted to revisit before I left the
town. This was now about four hours before the train was supposed
to leave, and I still had a piece of the wall to get, and my luggage to
pick up, but I felt I had some time to kill. I could spend it drinking
beer, or I could spend the time doing something I couldn't do
anywhere else in the world but Berlin.

The central building in the set is an opera house. It looks down over
a plaza area with a fountain. On the sides are two cathedrals, the
Deutsche (German) and the Fransosische (French) cathedral. All of
these have statues all over them, and the two cathedrals have gold-
plated statues on the very tops. You have to see them. The French
one was put there by some Brandenburg emperor to welcome French
Hugonauts to Berlin. In sharp contrast to some other leaders, he
was very interested in religious freedom.

I was walking around the French cathedral and there was a sign
that seemed to indicate that there was a pub inside that was open
until 1 am. Why, that's absurd, this is a cathedral. Then, I saw
someone coming out of it. Maybe the door's open and I could see
inside the cathedral. It was, and I did. Inside, it's more like a tower
than a cathedral, with two intertwined circular staircases spiraling
several stories straight up. I followed the stairs in amazement;
maybe I could go all the way to the top! I couldn't. There was a gate
at about half way up, but it was still amazing looking down and up.

Somebody came out of a door on about the third floor. (Talking
about floors was kind of silly; the stairs just went up and up and
there might be a room off to the side anywhere at all.) In fact there
was a small wine pub, although there was no customers. I ordered a
beer. In a French cathedral. In Berlin. Who would have thunk it?

As I was paying for it, I noticed that my charge card was missing. I
must have left it at the restaurant I went to. This was kind of
shocking, because last time I went to Germany, I mistakenly left
behind two charge cards when I threw away some old papers I didn't
need, and somehow someone picked them out of the trash. Deja Vu.
OK, so there's one more thing to pick up on my list: a chunk of the
wall, my charge card, and my luggage, and I've got about three and a
half hours to do it in. I was starting to become concerned that I
wasn't going to have time.

I was close to the wall. Well, maybe ten minutes walking distance.
Maybe fifteen. I walked there. Perhaps it was cover of darkness,
perhaps the fence was arranged a little differently, but I felt safe to
go into the construction site. There were wall slabs all over the
place. I had been carrying around "tools" I had improvised for the
situation: two rocks, one sharp and the other one heavy, for
chipping away. The heavy one was a piece of granite cobblestone. (I
typically don't pack pick-axes and I didn't feel like buying one in
town.) I unwrapped them and looked for an appropriate specimen.

Much of the wall was in the form of segments that were like upside
down letter T's. They had their own base so you could pick them up
and move them wherever (assuming that their weight was no issue).
They were concrete with those pre-stressing steel rods embedded in
them. If you had a big motor vehicle, like a big truck, you could
probably smash the concrete and bend the steel, but you couldn't
break through because you'd be tangled in steel rods with big
chunks of concrete hanging off of them. From a distance, they
actually look thin and flimsy, with typical Eastern Block quality.
And, one side always had wild graffiti over every square inch.

Well, these construction workers actually had made picnic tables
by supporting some slab surfaces at the right height. They must
have had cranes. It was a pretty surrealistic sight, in the middle of
the night, in a debris-filled construction site, with pieces of the
Berlin wall laid out as picnic tables.

I found a piece that was lying there, wrapping it in paper I had
brought. I discarded my "tools". Now, to get to the restaurant to
pick up my card, and on to my hotel to pick up my luggage, and to
the train station to catch a train. Time was running short.

I was just a hundred feet from the Potsdamer S-bahn subway
station. It was under construction, and I heard the train I wanted
come and go as I ran from one half to the other. Frustrated, I
decided to take a more direct subway, from a station that was
walking distance. (At night the trains come every 20 minutes or so,
and there's a delay for every connection.)

I was starting to get a bit panicky and I started to run. I heard
explosions in the sky. There was fireworks. I have no idea why. I
swear I was not taking drugs, just two beers so far that evening, one
with dinner and one in the Cathedral. So I was running backwards,
looking at the fireworks, past the wall site, past the circus, past the
Füherbunker site.

All of a sudden, a car stopped. This guy wanted to know how to get
somewhere. I started to say I was an American and I had no idea.
He wanted to get to Brandenberger Tor, the big German victory gate.
Heck, that's easy, you just go up here. He wanted more help. Then, I
got this great idea. I said, drive me to my restaurant and I'll point
you in the right direction. What serendipity.

So, I got in his car. He was black, from Nigeria, and his English was
excellent. His date was blonde caucasian. Adolf would be proud.
And just a few hundred feet from where he died. This is too weird
but I swear it really happened this way.

So, it's just a few hours before my train leaves, and I'm directing
this guy around, and I'm sortof used to walking and so we kindof
missed a few turns in the rapid Berlin traffic. We ended up going in
a direction that perhaps he perceived as getting him lost instead of
where he wanted to go. He kicked me out of the car, right in the
middle of a busy street, but close to my restaurant, right on the far
side of Alexanderplatz. Maybe it was the fact that I was perspiring
heavily from the stair climbing and running and panic, I don't
know.

I showed up at the restaurant, and they were glad to see me, being
super-polite and apologetic. I picked up my chargecard. (The word
"creditcard" is a widespread German word, but nobody knows what
a "charge card" is.) Looking at my map, I saw that there was an
easier U-bahn stop to get to than Alexanderplatz. Time was short. I
followed my map and walked in a straight line till I found it.
Glancing at the map again as I was walking down the stairs, I
realized that it wouldn't work because a section of the subway was
under construction, so I couldn't use it. I emerged and started
running to the Alexanderplatz station anyway. Time was short.

Suddenly, right there in front of me, there was a stunning sight, a
huge, hollow ghost of a church. It was big, the size of
Nickolaiskirke, and red brick, just like Nickolaiskirke, but there
was only three walls standing with jagged edges, and no roof, and
no glass on the windows, and no wood anywhere, and black smudge
all over it, and no quaint little German houses around it, and no
lights anywhere, it was all alone and cold and dark. And perhaps,
just perhaps, there was the faint sound of air raid sirens in the
wind. It was left as a monument to WW2, as they do sometimes in
Germany, a sortof "never again" kind of thing. It was a moving
sight, at night, in the darkness, the sound of traffic.

It was late. I started running. By sheer coincidence, I found myself
running across the exact same stretch of busy street that the
Nigerian driver had left me off at. Deja Vu.

So I got to Alexanderplatz S-bahn station. The U-bahns are
Untergrund, pretty typical subways. The S-bahns are Schnell (fast)
trains that are usually above but sometimes below ground, and go
over a wider area faster with fewer stops. They are roughly
analogous to Muni vs Bart, except that they are integrated together
in a more unified system.
map of U-Bahn and S-Bahn system

So I zoomed with the piece of the wall and the charge card to my
hotel to pick up my luggage. At the time I had about an hour and a
half before the train left, and I was in a really cocky mood and I
stopped off at a beer place that's between my hotel and the U-bahn
station.

There was a guy there that I had seen there the night before, when he
was so drunk he was just about falling off his barstool. We started
talking and he introduced me to several other people in the bar,
whom he may or may not have known before tonight. I felt like
staying, I was actually meeting people in Berlin instead of just
being a passive observer.

All I have to do is to go a half a block to my hotel, get my stuff from
the guy who runs it, and get back into the subway. Piece of cake.
The hotel is in the upper two floors of this building. The family
that runs it comes from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. I
remember him telling me not to pick up my stuff before 5pm
because he wouldn't be back. Ha! No problem, I won't get back
before 5. It was now after 11pm. What if it's too late? What if some
door is locked somewhere and everyone's asleep and they don't
know English anyway? What if my luggage was, just, sortof, Gone?

I figured I should not push my luck. I went to the hotel. I was kindof
late, but he gave me my stuff and I scampered off to the train station
downtown, where I had arrived. I got there fifteen minutes before
my train was supposed to leave. I had to mail some postcards, and
then get on the train. No problem. It's not that big of a station.
How could I mess it up?

Funny, the train to Copenhagen wasn't on the schedule. And, it
wasn't anywhere to be found. After doing some frantic running
around looking for people who didn't know and didn't know
English, I consulted this computer they have to do schedules. You
push buttons and turn this big wheel and try out different
schedules. I had used one before, and it was the only source of
information available.

My ticket said it started from "Berlin-LBG". I guess I never worried
about the LBG until just now. At approximately 12:21am I
confirmed that LBG stands for Lichtenberg, the name of another
train station way into East Berlin. That's where I should have been
at 12:13am. Looking at the map later, I realized that Berlin has
several train stations for external travel, tucked into their S-Bahn
stations. I had been to four stations already that had external
service, but I didn't really notice it before.

The computer had bleak news: the next train leaving in that
direction would leave in an hour, drop me off in Lichtenberg
shortly after, and I'd wait until 3am for the next train. The neat
part is that the computer scheduled which S-bahn I should take to
get to Lichtenberg. The local trains were integrated in with the
intercity transportation in one unified system, something I've
never seen done in America.

Five hours later, I arrive in Copenhagen. Yawn.

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is a quintessential European city. It is significantly
smaller than Berlin, but it has much more in the line of old
buildings. During World War II, they were quickly invaded by
Germany, but an active resistance from both the underground and
the authorities convinced the allies that they were OK, and they
were not bombed when the allies invaded. When the Nazis made
Jews in Denmark wear a Star of David armband, the King wore one
too.

They have the longest continuous royalty in the world, which fits
in to the government similar to the way the British royalty does,
except that there's no juicy scandals, beyond a few speeding tickets.

The Danish language is weird. You see a lot of words that look like
German, but it's sortof like it's farther away than German. In
Poul's shower, there was a bottle that said "Skumbad" on it. I
assume it was some sort of shampoo or bubblebath.

I got to see Poul's institute. He's trying to found a department
dedicated to computer-aided mathematics, especially symbolic
mathematics.

They're not nearly as obsessive about their beer. There's no
gradation line on the beer glasses, and you sometimes get beer
served in a plain glass or one of another brand.

If you want to see lots of quaint European buildings, statues and
stuff, Copenhagen is a good choice. I found myself just walking
around downtown randomly and finding stuff that was just as
interesting as the tourist highlights they directed you to. In the old
part of town, streets would go on for about two blocks, and then
change names and change direction slightly.

One of the tourist attractions was a church named Nickolais's
Church. Since I had seen the one in Berlin, I thought I should see
this one. Maybe they're a chain or something.

It wasn't a church anymore. It was an art museum for children.
How do you make a museum for children? Seems like a
contradiction. All of the art pieces were for or by children, they
were all durable, and many were participatory, either things that
move or things that you climb through or whatever. There were
workshops where kids were making things. There were happy kids
running around having a great time. Blew me away.

There was a big glass box that people climb into with a floor that
slid up and down and tilted in different directions. It would play
"music" depending upon who stood where.

Poul took me to see a small memorial part dedicated to Danish
resistance fighters during World War II. It wasn't on the tourist
map. It was on the site where the Nazis carried out their executions,
out in the suburbs, very simple but very dramatic. It was like a
small park, with pretty trees and a few simple patches of flowers.
Against a wall, there was a set of plaques, one for each person who
died, with a poem and, for some, the exact name of the resistance
organization they were a part of. And, further down the trail, past a
few incomprehensible signs, was the pit. With dirt mounded up
fifteen feet on three sides to catch stray bullets, and covered with
well-maintained grass, we walked in via the open fourth side.
Three wooden posts, slowly decaying over the years. A metal
plaque in the ground.